


Dream Catcher

by stoplightglow



Category: Bandom, My Chemical Romance
Genre: Dreams and Nightmares, M/M, Soulmates
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-24
Updated: 2019-02-24
Packaged: 2019-11-04 19:03:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,424
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17903768
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/stoplightglow/pseuds/stoplightglow
Summary: The soulmate connection manifests uniquely in everyone, and Frank is certain he would love whatever Gerard had to offer him even if they were different, but it’s times like these he’s glad Gerard is an artist. But it’s also times like these that he’s sorry Gerard’s inspiration has to come from such a fucked-up head.





	Dream Catcher

**Author's Note:**

  * For [sixthofnever](https://archiveofourown.org/users/sixthofnever/gifts).



> happy birthday, saint mercy <3 you shine so damn bright  
> and, as always, thank you nat for beta.
> 
> **warning for semi-graphic descriptions of drowning. please stay safe! ******

Darkness everywhere, and Frank can’t breathe.

His chest hurts so badly he’d scream if he had the capacity. It must be because he’s down this deep, all that pressure crushing and rearranging his insides. Everything is a shade of murky green water, but on second thought, that may just be the insides of Frank’s eyelids. Down he sinks, further and further.

Suddenly — light. Frank opens his eyes and it’s blinding. Not light like Heaven, no; light like emergency operations, like prison floodlights.

Tiny, pearlescent bubbles float out of his mouth and away, but he can’t find any reason in that since his mouth isn’t open and there isn’t air in his lungs to be released in the first place. The hand he raises into his field of vision is alarmingly blue and fuzzy around the edges. His eyes won’t focus. 

The air bubbles rise up and out of sight, and Frank is powerless to stop them. His limbs are heavy and immobile, just more weight dragging him down to the ocean floor, where everything else that overstayed its welcome is already dead and decaying. He supposes he should get used to his new company.

He’d been on a dock, Frank knows that much. It hadn’t been warm but it had been sunny, and there was another person there, maybe — his memory is just as distorted as his vision. There’s no recollection of how he ended up down here. Only the sick, overwhelming pain of his lungs collapsing and water rushing in. 

He honestly thought he’d last longer than this. What a way to fucking go.

He may as well close his eyes.

Something shakes him, hard and sudden, and he jackknifes up in bed so fast he’s dizzy with it. Gerard is standing over him, his knit eyebrows and concerned expression obvious even in the low light.

“Hey,” he says, quiet but not quite a whisper. “You sounded like you were in pain. Nightmare?”

“I guess,” Frank says slowly. The edges of the dream are already frayed and dissipating, and he has to fight the urge to try and cling to them in order to make his explanation easier. He knows he doesn’t actually need the memories for Gerard to understand. “Was I screaming?”

“No, it wasn’t that loud.” Gerard shifts his weight from one foot to the other, and Frank really takes in for the first time that Gerard isn’t on his side of the bed like he should be. Gerard says, “You stopped breathing for a minute. It was hard to get you to wake up.”

That isn’t surprising. Frank always goes far under. He stretches out an arm, quietly grateful that in this version of reality his limbs are working, and feels the spot where Gerard usually sleeps. It’s cold. “Where were you?”

For a second Gerard looks like he’s going to play dumb, but then he frowns and his eyes drop. “The kitchen. I needed to get some stuff out of my head, but I didn’t want to turn on the lights in here while you were asleep.”

“You were drawing?” Frank asks, and Gerard nods. The weight in his gaze isn’t hiding anything. Goosebumps break out along Frank’s arms. “Was it—”

“You tell me.” Gerard picks up his sketchbook from the nightstand and Frank shifts back a little so he can sit down on the bed without having to walk around. He flips it open to the most recent page, and the scene sketched there makes Frank’s blood run cold. 

He isn’t explicitly in the drawing, more just a silhouette that bears a similar shape to his body, but the emotion is dead on. He feels trapped and suffocated all over again from simply looking at it. “Yeah,” Frank says, then has to clear his throat before he can continue. “Yeah, that’s — exactly. It was just like that.”

“Fuck,” Gerard breathes, and his expression is heartbreaking. “I should’ve, I don’t know. I can’t believe I didn’t realize at first. It’s just that they never look like this, I thought maybe it was my own head for once.”

His hands are white-knuckled on the sketchpad so Frank pries one off and brings it up to his mouth to kiss the palm. Gerard’s sigh reverberates around the room.

“It’s not your fault,” Frank says, meaning it. “You’re right, they don’t normally look like that. That’s more — well, that’s the stuff that was common back before I found you.”

“Yeah,” Gerard says kind of absently, then shakes his head like he’s coming back to himself. “I mean, I know it was, it’s all over my old sketchbooks. I just don’t like to think about it very much.”

“Me neither.” Frank reaches out and traces the outline of the drowning body with his finger. “Is that the only one you drew?”

Gerard looks away again and turns kind of shifty, not answering. He’s probably come to terms with the fact that he can never lie to Frank. Frank reaches over and gently tries to turn to the next page. Gerard hesitates but ultimately lets him. 

It’s a hand and a wrist running off the page, decayed like the fish have already gotten to it, gruesome and shaded mercilessly. Frank holds back a shudder. If Gerard hadn’t woken him up, maybe that’s what would have been next.

Still — as awful as it is to see his dreams on paper like this when it hasn’t been a peaceful night, it’s better than having it all stuck in his head with no way to explain it or let it out. The soulmate connection manifests uniquely in everyone, and Frank is certain he would love whatever Gerard had to offer him even if they were different, but it’s times like these he’s glad Gerard is an artist. But it’s also times like these that he’s sorry Gerard’s inspiration has to come from such a fucked-up head.

“It’ll be good dreams tomorrow night,” Frank says, not sure which one of them he’s reassuring. Normally, that’s a promise he can keep. Since they’d met — three years ago when Frank had realized that the guy sitting across the aisle on the train was an identical match to the face saving him in his nightmares every night, and the guy sitting across the aisle had realized Frank was the spitting image of all the disturbing scenes he’d been turning in for art school — it hadn’t been all sunshine and rainbows, but it had been so much better. This was just an anomaly.

Gerard runs his thumb light as a feather along Frank’s jawline until it catches back towards his ear, then rests his hand there instead. “Even if it’s not, I’ll still be here. I’ll notice this time.”

“I’m sorry you have to see all of it.” Frank is grateful to have the touch to lean into. Gerard is solid and warm, the real deal of him too good for even Frank’s subconscious to corrupt. 

“I’m not,” Gerard says. 

The adrenaline has slowly drained out of Frank and been replaced by the exhaustion that comes with waking up in the middle of the night, and Gerard must be able to tell, because he nudges Frank until he rolls over enough for Gerard to lie down next to him. 

The sleep is almost immediate. Even though he knows Gerard is no shield, it’s hard to feel like anything can touch him like this. 

His mind’s eye warps from blackness into the surface of some body of water, rippling and glimmering. He’s not there yet, but he can feel it approaching, all that air and sunshine within reach. 

In the end, he doesn’t even have to make it the whole way. A familiar hand reaches down from the dock and hauls him up, and he has just enough time to gulp in a breath and catch a shy smile before a warm light whites everything out. It’s real sunlight this time, he’s sure of it.

Before he opens his eyes, he almost expects to find an empty bed and a new drawing where Gerard’s body should be, another reflection of what Frank had just seen inside his head. Instead, when his senses switch on, he feels an arm wrapped around his waist and Gerard’s warm breath puffing against the back of his neck. Their digital clock says it’s sixty-thirty. 

He finds Gerard’s hand draped over his chest and folds his own on top of it. Behind him, Gerard stirs but doesn’t wake. 

Frank closes his eyes again, and he lets sleep take him.


End file.
